Talkin' 'bout a revolution

In a remarkable career, Alex Mitchell has met many of the world's most powerful, influential and famous figures.

30 October 2011 — 3:00am

FIFTY years ago I was working for an ambitious and dynamic young newspaper proprietor called Rupert Murdoch on the Mount Isa Mail in the Queensland outback, covering one of the longest and most bitter mining disputes in the history of Australia.

Within seven years I was on London's Sunday Times Insight team that exposed the Soviet agent Kim Philby and then dismantled in forensic detail the crooked empires of publisher Robert Maxwell and offshore mutual-fund fraudster Bernie Cornfeld.

People you meet ... Alex Mitchell speaks at the launch of The News Line.

Forty years ago I was challenged to a swimming race by General Idi Amin at a hotel swimming pool in Uganda and wisely allowed him to win. Later he gave me the first interview for British television following his bloody military coup, after I told him it would probably be watched by the Queen, to whom he was greatly devoted.

And 35 years ago I was discussing the world's republics with Colonel Muammar Gaddafi in his spartan Tripoli headquarters and he laughed in disbelief when I told him that in my homeland, Australia, the head of state was Elizabeth II, the Queen of England. (She had the last laugh.)

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Interview subject, Vanessa Redgrave

To me, journalism has been the Great Adventure. It began in Townsville in north Queensland - a 10-year-old boy with a restless imagination had free access to comics and Penguin books because his parents owned a newsagency.

I grew up daydreaming of Clark Kent, who wrote for The Daily Planet in working hours and changed the world by night. Superhero fantasy aside, the ideal has remained with me: a journalist's duty is to uncover the truth and the truth can and does change things - as the Murdoch empire, Wall Street and Arab potentates are starting to discover.

On leaving high school I became a cadet reporter on the Townsville Daily Bulletin. At the end of each week I was presented with a pay packet containing six crisp pound notes. They were giving me money for something I loved doing: I was still in disbelief when I gave up full-time reporting on The Sun-Herald 47 years later.

A year into my cadetship, I joined the Mount Isa paper and then obtained a transfer to Sydney's The Daily Mirror and the paper's Canberra bureau during the fierce tabloid battle with Fairfax's The Sun.

Muammar Gaddafi.Credit:Camera Press London

Like many of my generation, I fled the arid conservatism of the Menzies era and headed to Fleet Street, where I found a place on The Sunday Times during the legendary editorship of Harold Evans and where I served a higher apprenticeship under Aussie compatriots Bruce Page, Murray Sayle and Phillip Knightley.

In the era of the Vietnam War, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the murder of Martin Luther King, the violent apartheid regime in South Africa, the British Army's occupation of the north of Ireland and the eruption of class warfare in Britain, I moved to the left, became a socialist and quit mainstream journalism to join Britain's Trotskyist party and work as editor of its daily newspaper, Workers Press, later called The News Line.

I travelled to the Middle East with Oscar-winning actor Vanessa Redgrave, my fellow Central Committee and political committee member, to promote her documentary film The Palestinian, which won awards at Third World film festivals.

The Workers Revolutionary Party imploded spectacularly in 1985 amid a sex and finance scandal. The organisation split and I was expelled first from one side and then from the other. I closed this chapter of my life and returned home in 1986 to restart my career as a journalist in the mainstream media. I placed my British experience into a vault and threw away the combination.

But as Karl Marx once observed: ''We travel through life with our history strapped to our backs.'' Our experiences can't be shaken off and, as I discovered, they can't be buried, either.

I had always lived by the discipline of daily and weekly deadlines that rarely left time for the longer view. But since leaving The Sun-Herald four years ago I have had time to reflect on my decades in media, here and overseas, and the time had arrived to record those experiences in the pages of a book.

Now, in the midst of a ravaging world economic crisis, it's not hard for me to stand up for my beliefs. Indeed, I have become more convinced that a planned economy that distributes wealth to everyone is the only way to safeguard human society and the global environment.

Today's biggest news story is the relentless round of summits on ways to rescue the crisis-ridden capitalist system when the real debate has moved on - a small but growing number of people born in the age of computer technology and digital communication who share globalised social values are interested in discussing how to devise an alternative system.

An old subeditor on my first job instructed me never to use the word ''I'' in a story. ''The readers are not interested in you,'' he snapped.